On Sleeping in Bathrooms and Other Adventures

One thing I’ve learned in my too-short years on planet earth is that there is always, always a version of how things could be going that is worse than how things are going for you now.

Sure, it may seem like the world is out to get you, nothing ever seems to turn out like you’d expected, or even as it seems it ought to given reasonable odds.  Time and again you work and suffer and struggle, and things still don’t turn out, or they go worse than you thought they could go.  Even when things seem to be at their worst, though, there’s usually a way for them to be actually worse than they are.  And in that difference, that sometimes slim-seeming margin between probably the worst and really the worst, I’m often able to find some solace, if not a few blessings to count.

When I was a kid I hated pesto.  I thought it was solidly one of the nastiest concoctions grown-ups habitually fed each other; the only thing I could think regarding this vile green-smelling stuff was that they were trying to secretly poison one another, but had all agreed to a weird sort of game of chicken where the first one to make a yuck face lost.  With an effort, I can recall the sensation of how my younger mind imagined it must taste, based on the smell and the look of the stuff, and it certainly seemed revolting.  If offered it I would refuse, if forced to try it (I wasn’t) I was certain I’d hate it.  The alternative was certain death by yuck.

I made it difficult for others to eat it as well.
(Note: head size is actually to scale)

At some point in my early teens or shortly before, I was home from school one afternoon and I was starving, or thought I was.  Some members of my family were rather large growers, a group in which I happened to be included, and it’s possible that a growth spurt was responsible for this sudden surge of hunger in what I seem to recall as an otherwise ordinary afternoon, or it could have been something else.  Whatever the reason, dinner was hours away, and I as sure I’d pass out and expire before it arrived.  

I went to the fridge, only to find that there was at that time one dish and one dish only available that I could eat on the spot.  Most of the fridge’s contents were ingredients for future meals, and were therefore off-limits.  There were a few odds and ends and plenty of condiments.  There were things I could have heated up in the freezer, but to my young mind that would require Cooking, at art which I would not fathom, much less bring under my clumsy control, until I was in my early twenties.  I could microwave like a virtuoso, and scramble some eggs in a pinch, but that was about it.  So that left only the leftovers, generally considered to be fair game for anyone in our household, and of these there was only one dish of any significant size.

It happened to be a bowl of leftover rotini, covered in pesto.

And I can’t honestly say now how or why the decision was made, but I decided that day that it was better to try to eat what disgusted me than to keep going hungry out of stubbornness.  I heated the pesto without ceremony, grabbed a spoon, and returned to the computer game I’d been playing (it may have been Age of Empires, or possibly Myst, I can’t remember clearly now)(maybe Roller Coaster Tycoon?  It certainly wasn’t homework).

If I remember correctly, and can bring the memory into comparison with my experiences of today as clearly as I feel I can, it wasn’t a particularly good dish of microwaved leftover pesto pasta.  It had probably been terrific before I’d gotten to it, but I see it now as salty, and a little dry, the dark basil sticking to the curls of rotini like defeated leaves wrapped around a dusty curb.  Or something.

But I ate it, all of it, and by the time I was eating the last few bites I realized that I didn’t hate pesto.  It wasn’t bad at all.

“Are you eating pesto?” Mom asked walking by.  I said I was, and asked if there were any more.  She said I’d eaten all of it.

From that time onwards, I have enjoyed pesto, and seen it as at least equal with, if not at times superior to, the standard red sauce option.

But more important than the ability I obtained that day to eat even more things was the lesson I puzzled out afterwards: if you want to learn how to eat something that disgusts you, wait until you’re very hungry and then try again.  And this trick has actually worked for me since.

The important statement to keep in mind is, Hey!  I didn’t think I could do that, but turns out I can!  Hurray for adversity!

I say all this by way of an illustration, of course, of my first point, which is that no matter how bad things are going, they could always be a little worse (or oftentimes a lot).

Obviously in my little parable (which is true even if a little trite), there could have been nothing at all to eat, which would have counted as an actual hardship and not a phony “but-I-don’t-wanna” one, or there could have been something genuinely disgusting or questionably healthy for me to eat, and for the choice to be between that and real hunger, which I believe I am lucky enough to have never actually experienced, whatever angry things my stomach might make me say to people when I skip a meal.

But the point is that I was capable of expanding my capabilities, if I happened to want to do so badly enough.  Being a less driven individual than might have been, this has almost always happened as a result of outside pressure (I was hungry) rather than internal pressure, but I’m still willing to count it as a form of self-improvement.

How does all this relate to stories or to storytelling?

I’m glad you asked!

Characters who never change, who never grow or fail or acknowledge shortcomings or learn, can be pretty disappointing in the long run.  The best stories I’ve ever read or seen have dealt, at their uttermost core, with characters who are forced to reevaluate, renegotiate, or redefine who they are and what they are able to do, in order to triumph over the problem of the story.  In the end, most of the best stories, when they’re unraveled down to their most essential parts, are not about the problems that the characters overcome (or fail to), but the changes those problems make in the character’s lives and in the characters themselves; who they were before and after, and whether or not they gained or lost anything valuable by the change.

Since the best way to write is to draw from experience, I encourage you as a writer or storyteller to jot down a few times in your life that you felt like you just couldn’t take any more, but then you had to take a little more, and you found out that you were able.  What did you think or say at the time?  What did that feel like?  These are things worth picking apart and trying to understand, so that we can unite speculation with genuine feeling in order to forge characters that really mean something, not only to ourselves but to our audiences.

Another brief anecdote before I’ve had done; for whatever reason, I am almost always most comfortable sleeping on my stomach or on my side, and am almost never able to fall asleep comfortably lying on my back.  I don’t know why this is; on the premise that it indicates that I have a weak personality (as internet searches sometimes hint when I’m curious about the matter), I’ve attempted to overcome my aversion by sheer will: “I am not going to sleep tonight unless it is on my back and not my stomach!”  I wait, and I get less and less comfortable, and then finally I cave, turn over, and usually promptly go to sleep.  

That being said, I am unembarrassed to say that, whether due to sitting up with a sick pet, or having to make some strange last-minute accommodations, or for other reasons, more than once in my life I have found myself in the unique but awkward position of having to spend the night on the bathroom floor.  I have never questioned which position I will sleep in when I’ve had to do so, and I have indeed slept soundly, even if I was unable to turn the lights off (it was a little like the Ministry of Love, but maybe that’s another story).

The difference between those times where I was trying to force myself to sleep on my back and those times when I was able to sleep however I had to is simple.  In all the latter cases, I was really just that tired.

No matter how difficult we think the world is being to us, there are two things worth keeping in mind.

One is that it’s worth trying to imagine how things would have to be before they were really desperate, and then to contemplate on the difference between the way things really are and how they could be if they really were the worst possible, and take what comfort you can in the advantages held over that worst-case version of yourself and their troubles.

It could always, always, always be worse.

Of course, there are both times and persons stuck in them which prove really and truly to be the worst they could be, at least within reason.  If you find yourself in such a situation, and simply can’t imagine it being any worse, then this post obviously does not apply to you.  You have my sympathy and my genuine hope for improvement. 

(If the lack of a worse possible scenario arises of course from a simple lack of imagination, then I withdraw the above remarks, but hopefully that goes without saying.)

The thing that’s worth keeping in mind in such difficulties is that when we find ourselves in such a position, pushed squarely beyond what we formerly believed to be the limit of our capability, and when we find that we are able to do things we didn’t think we could do, this is one of the only times, the ONLY times, that we are able to decide for ourselves what we can and cannot accomplish, and make a little expansion for the better in the definition of our characters.